dependency issue with leveldb? #3864

I just switched to the 0.9.0rc3 branch, after last building 0.8.x. There's a new build system now, using autoconf.

I ran ./autogen.sh and ./configure successfully, but when I ran make it failed:

  [...]
  CXX    bitcoind.o
  CXX    bitcoin-cli.o
  CXX    version.o
  AR     libbitcoin_server.a
  AR     libbitcoin_cli.a
  AR     libbitcoin_wallet.a
  AR     libbitcoin_common.a
  CXXLD  bitcoin-cli
  CXXLD  bitcoind
/usr/bin/ld: ../src/leveldb/libleveldb.a(db_impl.o): relocation R_X86_64_32S against `_ZTVN7leveldb2DBE' can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC
../src/leveldb/libleveldb.a: could not read symbols: Bad value
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

I was able to fix it by doing:

cd src/leveldb
make clean
cd ..
make

but shouldn't there be a dependency check such that leveldb gets rebuilt if it has changed since the last build?

This is expected. Generally you may need to do a one-time make clean yourself if you change the build system (this includes changing the .am and .ac files)

In contrast with what many people think, there is no dependency check for changes to the (meta-)build system itself.